design-development integration

Why (and How) Developers Should Care about Design [Video]

Design is essential to software product development, and developers have a crucial role to play in good software design. Atomic’s path to understanding what design does (and all the various activities covered by that seemingly simple word) began when our company was a few years old. We were turning out great code, and we were […]

Atomic’s Curriculum for Teaching Young Developers about Design

Created for recent Computer Science grads, Atomic’s Accelerator program is designed to supplement their development training and get them up-to-speed fast on higher-level consulting practices and skills. Participants in Atomic’s Accelerator Program make a commitment to study on top of their 40-hour work week, and they receive significant coaching and training in project management, team leadership, […]

Some Design Up Front: Why ‘Sprint Zero’ is Not Enough

Over the past several years, agile software teams have recognized the necessity of welcoming designers into their ranks. At the same time, organizations throughout the industry have struggled with and offered different perspectives on the “best way” for designers and developers to work together on agile teams.

Balanced Team is Coming to Grand Rapids in 2015

Update February 2015: Tickets for the event are now on sale! Early bird tickets are available through mid-February; standard tickets will be available after that. Please visit the Balanced Team 2015 Grand Rapids website for more information. We’re excited you’ll be joining us. See you soon! Many teams and organizations struggle with the question, “How […]

Pitfalls of Integrated Design and Development Burn Charts

When managing a software project that has both design and development scope, I have come to prefer using an integrated backlog of tasks and separate burn charts to track design and development efforts. Atomic continuously experiments with project management practices that help our poly-skilled teams manage their efforts and predictably deliver custom software products. I’ve […]

Design Saturates Our Software Process

The distinction between between developers and designers doesn’t make sense. We’re all designers — or we should be. At Atomic Object, our teams work on software products in an agile design process that infuses all stages of product development. Each member of the team is an active participant in the design process. The design process, […]

Poly-skilled Teams Deliver Products

A lot of what sets Atomic Object apart is our people – we work very hard to ensure we hire the best. But hiring great people isn’t enough. The best people need to be set up in an environment where they can use their skills effectively and translate their excellence into business value. Atomic’s strategy […]

The Benefits of Poly-Skilled, Co-Located Project Teams

This year at Atomic Object, we implemented a new practice: designers, instead of sitting all together in a group, sit co-located with the developers on their project. There is no “design team” or “development team” here; we all belong to “project teams.” This is just another step in our continued efforts to tightly integrate application […]